VL2 10/27/10 Riesenhuber Is it a Bird? Is it a Plane? Is it a Word?
Neural Mechanisms of Object Recognition

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Object recognition is a fundamental cognitive task that we perform countless times every day – such as right now when reading the words in this abstract. Yet, despite the apparent ease with which we see, object recognition is a very difficult computational problem. It is even more difficult from a biological perspective, since it involves several levels of understanding, from the level of cellular and biophysical mechanisms up to the level of brain systems and behavior. Remarkably, recent results from human neuroimaging and computational modeling covering areas as varied as face perception, reading, and car categorization, suggest an appealingly simple unified account of how our brains make sense of the world.

Dr. Maximilian Riesenhuber of Laboratory for Computational Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Neuroscience, Georgetown University Medical Center, presents on October 27.